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Saturday, March 24, 2012

The luxury of having an outdoor laundry line is something I never take for granted. Some farmgirls probably wake up in the morning, look outside, see that it's fair and breezy and think, "Today would be a great day to plant some daffodils or maybe go for a horseback ride." I start figuring out what I want to wash and hang up in the sun.

We use our laundry line all year round, and although we do own an old clothes dryer that runs on propane, it's still living over in The Shack (where we no longer have propane). The only thing I use it for is softening up clothes and sheets on air fluff, because it's down to just one heat setting: shrink.

Since there's a limit to how many pairs of socks and underwear even we can rationalize owning, the weather sometimes forces us to dry the laundry indoors, and then we use these awesome expandable folding racks.

After going through numerous wooden clothes drying racks over the years, which look quaint but aren't very sturdy, I finally tried this metal version, and it worked out so well we bought two more. Each one provides nearly 24 feet of drying space, and I can even drape big heavy quilts over them. They also make cozy little cat seats.

More below. . .

During the summer we keep one rack up all the time in the bathroom so we can hang our sweat soaked clothes up to dry, because scary things happen to piles of dirty wet laundry in hot and humid weather.

In an attempt to organize our new life in the new house, we also splurged on three of these heavy-duty laundry sorters, and now I don't know how we got along without them. My hunky farmguy Joe and I are about as far from fashionistas as you can get (is there a guy word for fashionista?), but farm laundry is serious stuff.

I know there was a time in my life when I dressed a lot better and yet had a lot less dirty laundry—maybe because I was in California and didn't need to pile on winter clothes—but these days we seem to be constantly surrounded by it. Now that the laundry is pretty well organized I really don't mind, though there are times when I'm sure some of the other 105 critters on the farm must be wearing socks and t-shirts.

The only problem is that once you've discovered how clean and fresh everything smells after blowing in the breeze (did you know that sunlight is a natural disinfectant and stain remover?), it's easy to put off doing a load of wash until the weather gets better, rather than drying it on racks in the house—which is probably part of the reason we need all those laundry sorters.

12 comments:

I had a beagle when I lived in the country many years ago. Your pictures of yours always make me smile. They are such joyous, sweet, piggy and stubborn little creatures. Lots of fun. They are such bad little dogs but they have such sunny dispositions that you can't really mind.

I need a folding clothes drying rack-it poured here today and my laundry is still wet. We do have a dryer, I'm just to cheap to use it sometimes!

P.S...I'd love to find out how you put the little blurb about comments under the comment box. I was wanting to do something similar, but i'm still a bit of a green thumb when it comes to re-arranging/adding to existing html and templates!

Hi Corrabelle,Yeah, I'm so in love with my laundry line that there are plenty of times when I end up hauling in still wet or rained on laundry and then hanging it up on the indoor racks. ;)

As for the comment form message (which is actually supposed to be above the comment box - so you can see it better! - but moved down below when Blogger made some changes to the comments section), if you're using the old user interface, you just go into Blogger and click on the SETTINGS tab at the top of the page, then click on the COMMENTS tab that will appear on the line below it. Then scroll down to where it says COMMENT FORM MESSAGE and type your message in there.

If you're using the new user interface (I don't have any experience with it), I'm sure the option is somewhere in the comment settings, so try to locate those.

First I saw the laundry on the line and remembered the !fresh air! smell. (sigh) The next picture comes and there is Bert. He must just think that he lives in Dog Heaven on Earth. The sun is shining and he is getting the most out of it with an all-over tan. On your 200+ acres live the luckiest and loved assortment of animals on earth. And their 2 humans. Thanks for all you do!

I'm so tempted to put up a line in our backyard, but would you believe that there are laws against it here in Silicon Valley. Seriously. It's considered a neighborhood blight. Ugh. Sad.And I know this was not the point of the post, but LOOK AT MOLLY DOODLE BUG IN HER TRAPEZE! I totally honked when I saw that.What a cute freak.

Laws against clothes lines? Can you take racks out temporarily? That's what I do... I save milk jugs and fill them with water to "sandwich" the rack legs so the wind can't blow them down. (Learned my lesson the hard way with that one day.....) Then, if the weather starts to turn, all I have to do is race out and haul the racks in, complete with laundry! So handy! Sure hope you can try it this way! Indiana Chris

We also live in a neighborhood where permanent clothes lines are against the association bylaws. We also have a very tiny backyard where a permanent line would, well, clothesline anyone walking through. So, we have conveniently concealed two permanent posts in the raspberry bushes against our garage wall, and when it's drying time, we string up a line between those and the privacy fence separating our yard from the neighbor's. We hang laundry out there all the time, which is probably against the rules even though the line itself is not permanent. We figure, if some homeowners' association stickler gives us trouble, we'll tell him our dryer is broken at the moment...

Hey, thanks for helping me figure out how two people can have SOOO MUCH laundry...the horses, goats, mini donkeys and chickens must be putting their dirty things in the hamper for me to wash too! LOL!!

January 2013 update: I know word verification is a big pain, but it's the only way I can stop the ridiculous number of anonymous spam comments I get every day. I don't want to require commenters to be registered Blogger or Open ID users because I know many of you aren't. Thanks so much for your understanding!

Hi! Thanks for visiting Farmgirl Fare and taking the time to write. While I'm not always able to reply to every comment, I receive and enjoy reading them all.

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